Defining a strategy for creating SEO keywords is a really crucial part of SEO. If you’re targeting the wrong keywords, then you’re results may suffer… you may be actually helping out your competitors.
When first getting into SEO I had the wrong idea of what keywords were, I thought you just took words similar to the topic that you were talking about and wanted to rank high for. It’s actually a bit more involved, below are ten tips for coming up with good KeyWords, thanks to Michelle Chance-Sangthong from Red Hawk Strategies for putting together a great SEO MeetUp and sharing some good SEO practices for creating SEO keywords. Here are some pointers from my experience and the SEO Meetup 5/11/10.
Keyword: is word or group of words that help search engines determine what a page’s content is about. Optimizing for particular keywords will help your page get a better rank in search engines when someone searches a site.
Ten tips for creating successful SEO keywords
- Define your users goals when viewing the site
What is your user coming to the site for? Are they looking to find out information? Looking for services? Or looking for a product. These things make a large difference when crafting your keyword list and creating your page content. You may need to create several pages to optimize for several different SEO terms. If your selling MP3 players you may want to have different pages for models, repair, brands, replacement parts and optimize them accordingly. - Define your goals when users view the site
What are you trying to get the user to do? Visit the site, click around, purchase an item submit their e-mail. Defining this will not only help you think of what key terms to use but will also help you ensure you put thought into getting the user to take action or complete a conversion. If you get a good rank but don’t get the result you want, then it’s missing the whole point. - Define your target audience
Think about the type of people are going to come to your site and cater to them. You’re better off catering to a majority than trying to be very general. Is your audience male or female?, how old are they?, what’s the income level?, what’s their ethnic background?, thinking about your audience and catering to them will help you create better keywords and better content. - Key word tools
There are many keyword tools online, some are free some cost money. These tools can help you think of keyword ideas and help see what keywords your competitors or using. If you’re new you can probably start off using a free tool, if you get good you may want to upgrade to tool that costs money.
Google’s SKTool, Keyword Spy, Word Tracker, Spy Foo, Mozilla - Organize your efforts
With all these keywords and efforts it’s bound to get confusing. Using a program such as Excel or another spread sheet program you can organize your keywords and define patterns to use for creating content. Sporadically creating pages with keywords with no overall strategy is like playing a football game with no game plans. - Check your competitors
If your competitors are ranking well you may want to look and see what they are doing. You wouldn’t want to try to copy them but they may give you some ideas for some terms that you can use for your own. A little research goes a long way. - Write for users not just search engines
Don’t cram your keywords into your copy and make it really obnoxious to read. After all the content is for the user. Getting a good page rank is great but if you’ve comprised your message in the process it may defeat the purpose. Write clear descriptive copy paying attention for the keywords your targeting and call it a day. - Keep it simple – One term per page
Don’t try to rank high for ten terms on one page, your home page doesn’t need to carry your site. Instead use landing pages to optimize for new seo search terms. Focusing on one term per page will help search engines clarify what you’re trying to rank for. This will give you more pages and expand your site as well which also helps with SEO. - Different words equal different search terms
If you’re trying to rank for a certain term, ex: “Jacksonville SEO”, don’t just optimize for that term. SEO Jacksonville, Jax SEO, Search Engine Optimization Jacksonville etc… are also key terms to optimize for. Word order, compound words and plurals can all be taken into consideration. Mix it up. - Keyword density
You need to aim for the write keyword density. Wikipedia “Many SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3 percent. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. A quick search on Google can provide many tools for checking this.
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